Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,288

about it and to have become somehow involved—or to be claiming, at any rate, that Feller had entrusted them with this or that aspect of the preparations. Axe heads were being forged just as Feller had promised, but as well there was rope to be twisted, splitting wedges to be made, and supplies to be laid in for the encampment that Feller imagined he would bring into being around the tree. The project was seen as requiring a month’s work. Feller’s ambitions soon grew to include the creation of a new town on the site, and this brought further delays.

It also entailed docking the log piles of Adam and the other members of the crew. Feller did this when no one was present to raise objections, and later explained it as a necessary investment that would be repaid manyfold when the big tree came down.

Not wishing to make any further investments in a plan that troubled him in more than one way, Adam traded some of his remaining logs for cloth and other items that were required by the children, then devoted some days to rafting the remaining ones together and floating them across the river to the shore beneath Camp. This was a large enough task that he had to adopt the ways of Feller, at least for a time, and hire other souls to help him. It seemed a reasonable plan at the outset but became more trouble than it was worth as the members of his crew found every possible way of doing things wrong; and when not doing things wrong, they fell to arguments, which they assumed must be as momentous to Adam as they were to them, and which Adam was somehow responsible for settling; and none was ever pleased with how they were resolved. As little as Adam liked Feller, he came quickly to understand why Feller dealt with his crew as he did.

Adam had worked for Feller in order to get what he needed to make a bigger dwelling for him and Eve and the children, but it almost immediately became obvious that his labors were at once too little and too much. Too little because the children grew so rapidly that Adam could never have cut down trees and expanded the cabin quickly enough to keep pace with them, and too much because they soon were given accommodations in other buildings around Camp. Adam’s log pile, when it finally made its way up the hill, dwindled and disappeared in a matter of days as the wood was used to shore up various structures that had fallen into disrepair as their builders wandered away or became forgettish.

Walksfar had spoken of other old souls who had accompanied him on the Trek, Cairn being one such, but for the most part they had not been in evidence. This changed as the twelve little ones grew and word of them somehow spread into the remote places into which those old souls had strayed during the many years that Walksfar had been drinking tea and carving marks on his wall. For the most part those were not as outlandish in their forms as Cairn; most were closer to Walksfar’s shape. But one had been dwelling among beasts for so long that he had begun to resemble a bear, and there was another soul that possessed no physical form at all but was embodied solely in movements of the air, made visible by entrained dust. Beast and Dusty seemed to favor each other’s company and were frequently seen together, the former sitting naked and hairy on the ground while the latter swirled about him in the form of a dust devil. Such was the community of souls in which the twelve children learned to crawl, then walk and talk. By the time they could go about on two feet they were already half as tall as Adam.

The existence of twelve large new souls could not be hid from the people of Eltown. Adam was glad to have moved his logs and concluded his dealings with those people, for on the occasions when he did cross the river to fetch something, he always found himself at the center of a crowd of excited souls demanding to know just what was going on over in Camp. Some there were who had seen Messenger of El descend into Camp but not depart, and knowledge of that had become widespread and given rise to rumors of such a far-fetched nature that Adam